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Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
In composite materials composed of soft polymer matrix and stiff, high-aspect-ratio particles, the composite undergoes a transition in mechanical strength when the inclusion phase surpasses a critical density. This phenomenon (rheological…
Amorphous materials of homogeneous structures usually suffer from nonuniform deformation under shear, which can develop into shear localization and eventually destructive shear band. One approach to tackle this issue is to introduce an…
For thin networked materials, which are spatial discrete structures constructed by continuum components, a paradox on the effective thickness defined by the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffnesses is found, i.e. the effective thickness is not…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
Investigation of inhomogeneities has wide applications in different areas of mechanics including the study of composite materials. Here, we analytically study an arbitrarily-shaped isotropic inhomogeneity embedded in a finite-sized…
We consider collective dynamics of self-propelling particles in two dimensions. They can align themselves according to the direction of propulsion of their neighbours, together with a random perturbation (i.e. rotational fluctuation). They…
Control over the physical properties of materials is ubiquitously required in many fields. One means by which this can be achieved is controlling the internal structure of multi-component materials with an eye to enhancing mechanical…
Polymer composites are ideal candidates for next generation biomimetic soft materials because of their exquisite bottom-up designability. However, the richness of behaviours comes at a price: the need for precise and extensive…
This paper presents a combined numerical-theoretical study of the macroscopic behavior and local field distributions in a special class of two-dimensional periodic composites with viscoplastic phases. The emphasis is on strongly nonlinear…
Topologically interlocked materials and structures, which are assemblies of unbonded interlocking building blocks, are promising concepts for versatile structural applications. They have been shown to exhibit exceptional mechanical…
Macroscopic friction coefficients observed in experiments are the result of various types of complex multiscale interactions between sliding surfaces. Therefore, there are several ways to modify them depending on the physical phenomena…
At the microscopic level, plastic flow of a jammed, disordered material consists of a series of particle rearrangements that cannot be reversed by subsequent deformation. An infinitesimal deformation of the same material has no…
Field induced assembly of reconfigurable structures with complex hierarchical configurations has recently become an area of intense research with the promise for exciting applications in programmable self-assembly and nano/microstructure…
Recent experiments and simulations have demonstrated that particle-covered interfaces can exist in stable non-spherical shapes as a result of the steric jamming of the interfacially trapped particles, which confers the interface with…
In this letter, structural rigidity concepts are used to understand the origin of instabilities in granular aggregates. It is shown that: a) The contact network of a noncohesive granular aggregate becomes exactly isostatic in the limit of…